After all the recent barn owl activity in the meadows, we have trained a camera onto the barn owl nest box that is up in one of the copses of trees. Two weeks on now and there have been no signs of a barn owl at the box. A tawny owl, however, did drop by one night:

I read that a tawny owl is unlikely to breed in a barn owl nest box, although it is not unheard of. We decided to have a check inside the box in case there were sticks, leaves or other detritus in there which would prevent an owl of any species from using it:

It was mostly clean in there, with just the sawdust on the floor that was put in when the box first went up two years ago. But a single owl pellet was lying on the floor in splendid isolation, suggesting that an owl had roosted within at some point this year:

You could see a lot of fur and a pair of orange rodent incisors sticking out of the right hand end of the pellet:

We dissected the pellet and entered into the wonderful world of trying to identify small rodent bones. As far as we could tell the pellet contained the remains of several field voles. The teeth that had been protruding were attached to this skull:

Below are several other skulls (on the left), lower jaws (in the middle) and hip bones (right) that were extracted from the pellet:

And shin bones (top left below), curved ribs (right) and, finally, thigh and arm bones (bottom left):

We don’t know whether the pellet was regurgitated by a barn owl or by a tawny, since both species are frequently hunting in the meadows at the moment. But it does seem like a good idea to get a tawny nest box up as well as the barn owl one, and we have chosen a location in the other copse of trees. A big old holm oak and whitebeam form the centre of the copse and there are several smaller trees at the edges:

I have now ordered two new tawny nest boxes from the Barn Owl Trust, one of which will go up in this copse of trees in the meadows. The second one is going to go into a new clearing that we plan to create in the wood this winter. However, we do know from experience that it may well be several years before anything happens in them.

I reported last time that there was something terribly wrong with the ringed female kestrel’s left eye:

The same thing happened last autumn as well, although on that occasion it was her right eye that had the issue. I don’t know what this problem is, but happily it doesn’t last for long and she is now back to full health:

The male is actually around the meadows more than her at the moment:

I noticed that WordPress now has the ability to generate a photo for you – you just tell it what you want. I asked it for a male kestrel on a branch and this is what it rustled up for me:

I find this a bit depressing. The generated image is so good that I think I might as well give up now and no longer bother trying to take photos of things myself!

But these days I do find myself using AI a lot, particularly to assist with moth identification as I go through the trap. It has speeded the whole process up hugely and made it far more enjoyable. It doesn’t always get it right, and I do still need to carefully check its ID, but it mostly gets me into the right area and is a sound starting point.

I have finished moth trapping for the year now, but am very much looking forward to recommencing operations next spring.

It is lovely to have this number of badgers around:

The mother pheasant and her six chicks are still wandering around the meadows. These chicks have also grown a lot and are now more noticeable since the meadows have largely been cut with fewer places to hide:

It has been interesting to see how long these chicks have stayed with their mother – apparently they will go around with her for 10 to 12 weeks as she teaches them how to survive in the wild. In stark contrast to this, a staggering 31 to 50 million pheasants are raised in hatcheries each year and are then released into the British countryside for recreational shooting. These unfortunate young birds will never have even seen their mother, let alone have the opportunity to learn anything from her, before being liberated into the great outdoors that they will have never seen before and be expected to fend for themselves. It is a very sobering thought.

Dave has nearly finished cutting both meadows now. The area below had a problem with vigorous wild parsnip growth, but, after several years of work, we have managed to sort this out. To celebrate this success, Dave has cut it especially short this autumn and it has been seeded with wildflower seed:

Emorsgate wildflower seed of various lovely native plants that do well on calcareous soils were scattered onto this area:

I thought that this next photo was very interesting. It is of one of our garden benches a few hours after some rain:

The lichen lacks a waxy cuticle and has acted as a sponge, absorbing and holding the rainwater and only slowly releasing it. Wherever lichens grow they thus create a damper microclimate, providing important habitats for wildlife and boosting biodiversity.

Over in the wood, the goshawk has returned for another visit:

A ghostly image of a tawny owl flying towards the nest box reminded me that we also needed to clean this owl box out.

The tawnies nested in this box this spring but, once the owlets had fledged at the beginning of May, stock doves moved in and raised their young in there too. A look in the box at the end of July, just prior to ringing these stock dove chicks, shows how many sticks the doves had brought in:

As we saw in the meadows this week, tawny owls do start prospecting potential nest sites very early indeed but they will not be able to use the box with those sticks in there. So here is another photo of Dave up a ladder, this time in the wood:

There is a camera on this box and so, after John had ringed the stock dove chicks in July, I knew that the doves had then gone on to attempt a second brood. Unfortunately it appears that this second, late brood had not been successful and there was a dead, unringed squab in the box.

There was also a sexton beetle in there, attracted by the smell of the carcass:

The sexton beetle will have been trying to bury the remains in the ground and then lay its eggs on it so that the beetle larvae will have food once they hatch. However, since the dead bird was in a box, this was never going to be a feasible plan.

This box is now cleaned out and is ready and waiting should the tawny owls decide to nest in there again next spring. I really hope that they do.

I would like to dedicate this post to Conor and Maddie since both my sister-in-law and my sister have lost their beloved labradors in the last month. Dogs become such a treasured part of the family and bring immense comfort and pleasure, but their lives go by way too fast.

There was great excitement when, back in August, a honey buzzard came down to one of the shallow ponds in the wood:

Honey buzzards are summer visitors to the UK, leaving for tropical Africa during September. So this bird will have left now but we really hope to see him again next year.

But a different rare and rather wonderful bird of prey has visited the wood this week and stepped in front of one of our trail cameras – a goshawk:

Goshawks are powerful avian predators and, as such, are vulnerable to persecution and egg theft. They were unfortunately driven to extinction in the UK in the 19th century.

An increase in records in the 1960s is thought to be because of escaped or deliberately-released captive birds, and it is from these birds that our current population grew.

The goshawk is now a scarce but widespread bird across Wales and southern Scotland and in other areas where there are large expanses of woodland such as the New Forest, Thetford Forest and Dartmoor. The population in the United Kingdom is estimated to be around 620 pairs.

The British Trust for Ornithology shows its breeding distribution as below, although this is only up until 2011:

These birds are Schedule 1 protected but, sadly, persecution still remains a threat and exact nest locations are kept secret. A bit of further research, though, suggests that there are now a few pairs breeding in the large woodlands of Kent – maybe even in the Blean which is quite close to our wood. Goshawks have been sighted there showing territorial behaviour during the breeding season.

The goshawk is new bird for the wood and comes in as number 52 on the list.

Sparrowhawks are frequently seen in the wood and here two of them are visiting the water together:

The meadows have had their share of thrills as well this week, starting with this photo of a short-eared owl at 6pm one evening, just as dusk was starting to fall:

The much better image below was taken by John the bird ringer who was driving back from a meeting at Sandwich Bay Bird Observatory in February 2024 when he spotted the bird. Luckily he had his camera with him in the car:

These owls are famous for coming out to hunt during the day. It is speculated that the individuals that do this fledged in the Arctic where there is no darkness at all during the summer, so they became used to being out and about in daylight.

The most reliable place to see a short-eared owl locally is in the winter at Elmley nature reserve on the Isle of Sheppey and we are looking forward to staying there again this January.

Last week I realised that there are at least three different barn owls visiting the meadows. The bird on the left below appeared to be ringed on both legs, another one was ringed on the right leg and the third one was not ringed at all:

I sent the photo of what I presumed to be a colour-ringed barn owl to the other John who regularly rings here. The bird appears to have a metal ring on its right leg and a much bigger ring on its left:

John was intrigued because barn owls never travel very far and so are an unexpected species to want to colour ring. He spoke to a friend of his who has a lot of experience ringing barn owls in Kent and they both suspect that this might be an escaped captive-bred bird and that the ring on the right leg might be a ‘closed’ ring. Closed rings are seamless metal circles that are slipped onto young chicks legs when they are very small and can’t be put onto older birds with larger feet. They therefore act as evidence that the bird was bred in captivity and has not been taken from the wild.

I am hoping that this bird turns up again and that we can gather some further information on it but so far this week I have only seen unringed barn owls on the cameras. I would love to know where the barn owls that visit here are roosting and breeding. We do have a barn owl box up in the meadows which has a camera trained on it and I can tell you now that they are not roosting and nesting in there:

Here is an action shot of a tawny owl, the third species of owl seen here this week:

Tawny owls are also very active in the meadows at this time of year and we love to hear them atmospherically calling around the house once it gets dark.

Back in the spring we found a tawny nest less than a kilometre away from the meadows in an area blessed with many lovely old mature trees, so there has to be a good chance that the tawnies that come here are from that family:

And I can’t talk about tawny chicks without also mentioning the four tawny owlets that fledged from a nest box in the wood this May. John had ringed them all a few days previously:

John has been ringing in the meadows a couple of times this week:

He has been catching a lot of blackcaps and chiffchaffs:

This is a male firecrest weighing only 4.9 grammes:

And a goldfinch that looks a bit ropey because it is going through its post-juvenile moult:

Every evening I put a few peanuts out which allows me to keep an eye on the health of the resident foxes and take action if necessary. Mange is a terrible thing and is a recurring issue around here, but it is a relief to see that all of the regulars are currently looking in fine fettle:

With the addition of two of this year’s cubs, our badger numbers are up to six which looks like quite a herd:

This badger below was in the process of cleaning its armpit and having a good old scratch. Badgers really know how to loll around:

We are making progress on many of our autumn jobs. The first meadow is now cut and Dave has embarked on the much larger second meadow, rushing to get it finished before the weather breaks:

He really enjoys spending time out in the autumn sunshine, sitting high up on the tractor with far reaching views out to sea. I definitely do not feel the same about getting into his over-large waders and sinking into the sludge of the wild pond to pull out its overgrown vegetation:

I have made a bit of a difference and some open water is now visible, but I am the first to admit that there is still a long way to go:

This is also a time-critical job that needs to be completed before male frogs start to hibernate in all that mud at the bottom. But the problem is that there is not yet enough water in there to make the plants easy to pull. Perhaps all the rain that is forecast for the next few days will actually materialise and sort that out for me.

I finish today with our tile art installation which has just had its annual maintenance overhaul:

Made by Ellie, our daughter-in-law, a few years ago, I love how it looks now that it has aged and is becoming colonised by plants. A peep between some of the tiles shows that many invertebrates, small mammals and reptiles are happily living there amongst the tiles, which was exactly what we had hoped for. I cannot think of a better thing to have done with these surplus roofing products.

This week we sailed out of Whitstable and into the Thames estuary onboard Greta, a Thames sailing barge built in 1892:

Once we had left the harbour, we headed for the Kentish Flats windmill farm to get a better look at it. There are four windmill farms in the mouth of the Thames:

The Kentish Flats consists of 45 turbines standing on a large, shallow plateau six miles offshore from Whitstable:

We weren’t allowed to sail through the array but we did get quite close:

It was a very calm day and we had reached the Kentish Flats using Greta’s engine. This was then switched off and we slowly drifted down with the tide towards the Red Sands Maunsell Fort

Three Maunsell army forts were built in the mouth of Thames during the Second World War to help defend the country against enemy aircraft. Each fort had seven connected steel and concrete platforms: five of them had guns, one was a searchlight tower and the seventh was the control centre and accommodation area.

Manned by rotating crews of over a hundred soldiers, the fort shot down twenty-two German planes and thirty V1 flying bombs during the war, as well as acting as a deterrent to any hostile aircraft wanting to drop parachute mines into the estuary.

But these days the interconnecting walkways have been taken down and the platforms declared unsafe:

We have had friends visiting this week and they accompanied us on this trip. We didn’t see much wildlife from the boat but below is Sue’s photo of a group of juvenile common tern who waited until I was below deck trying out the marine toilet before briefly settling on the water close by:

It was a really enjoyable day out and I had wanted to go and see the Maunsell forts for ages – and now I finally have.

On another day with our visitors we drove to West Hythe for a walk along the Royal Military Canal:

The Military Canal was dug between 1804 to 1809 in response to the threat of invasion by Napoleon. It was designed to be 60 feet wide, nine feet deep and 28 miles long, running along the northern edge of Romney Marsh.

We walked westwards along the footpath and soon got a view over the ruins of Portus Lemanis with Lympne Castle, now mainly a wedding venue it seems, in the background:

A bit further on and we were walking along the bottom edge of Port Lympne animal park, which provided some of the more unusual sights to be seen from a British footpath:

We loved to see that giraffe wandering free and casually grazing a hawthorn tree.

The footpath itself provided some wildlife interest too. We came across two slow worms out in the open on the path:

And also this marsh frog:

Marsh Frogs are Europe’s largest frog species but they are invasive and non-native here in the UK. Some were brought to Kent from Hungary in 1935 and released into a garden pond on Romney Marsh, from whence they have spread across southeast England. These large frogs are bad news and eat our native wildlife including common frogs and newts and they also spread the amphibian chytrid fungus which kills native amphibian populations.

On their final day with us, our visitors came on the September tour around the dormouse boxes in the wood. It was a bumper month and we found thirteen dormice plus a nest of adorable little babies with their eyes still closed.

We had only found three dormice both in July and in August and we had speculated that this was because the boxes were too hot for them, rather than it being anything more sinister. The increase in numbers now that we are in the cooler autumn seems to support this hypothesis.

We also found a yellow-necked mouse in box 24:

Some other photos from the wood this week:

Over in the meadows, I have interesting further information about the barn owl that is visiting the meadows most nights at the moment. The news is that there are actually at least three of them! As seen below, one is colour ringed on its left leg, one is ordinarily ringed on its right leg and one is not ringed at all:

The unringed owl was here before it was actually dark one evening:

As well as these barn owls, the tawny is also regularly here:

The ringed female kestrel has unfortunately got something wrong with her left eye:

She is not going to be able to hunt very well without her binocular vision to help her judge distances:

However, this is not the first time this bird has had a bad eye. In October 2025 it was her right eye that was affected as seen below:

Back then it had got better within the week. I fervently hope it is the same this time because this is a very special bird, having been hunting in the meadows ever since she was ringed here as a young bird in September 2019.

The male thankfully seems to be fine:

The female pheasant has taken to sitting on this perch as well which seems a bit peculiar:

She is also still to be seen around the meadows with her young family following along behind her:

Our foxes would, of course, be very interested in eating these birds if they could catch them:

But they are also very partial to a tasty rabbit:

I like this photo of a companionable badger grooming session:

It’s lovely to see them all getting along nicely.

My final photo for today is of this tiny fly that I caught in a glass by my kitchen sink one morning. It is a moth fly, so called because of the shape of their wings and long antennae. There are 102 species of moth fly in the UK and this one, Clogmia albupunctata, is fairly new to Britain, having first been seen here in 2012:

Its common name is the bathroom moth fly because its larvae live in the wet slime that tends to coat the inside of drains. I expect that I found it by the kitchen sink because it had came up through the plug. It’s such a sweet little thing – shame about the unsavoury drain slime though!

The evening of Monday 14th September produced quite a spectacle that had us, and I’m sure many others around Walmer and Deal as well, craning our necks up to the skies. Tens of thousands of house martins were passing through on their long journey south to sub-Saharan Africa, and the show went on for several hours until it got too dark for us to see them:

And they kept on coming, albeit in lesser numbers, throughout the next few days by which time hundreds of thousands must surely have flown by. Apparently 1.5 to 2.5 million house martins will leave the UK at the end of each summer, which is the number of our breeding adults and all of this year’s young.

John, the bird ringer, put his nets up high in the meadows and played their calls in the hope of ringing some. The birds definitely responded to the calls and came in closer..

..but sadly his poles weren’t quite tall enough to catch any of them.

On 3rd October 2019, however, the other John was ringing in the meadows when some house martins went over. He does have high poles and put his net up, played their calls and in no time at all had caught thirty-seven of them – a number which shocked us all and meant that John had a very, very late lunch that day:

House Martins have got feathery legs to keep them warm when flying at high altitudes, and it is thought that their migration route does indeed take them over the Pyrennes. They also carry the blood-sucking flat flies, Crataerina hirundinis. These flies have poorly developed wings and cannot fly on their own but will normally be tucked in amongst the bird’s feathers. They emerged to see what was going on, though, when the bird was unexpectedly stopped by the net.

John might not have caught any house martins this week but he showed me these two birds below as a cautionary tale because, surprisingly, they are different species. The bird on the left is a chiffchaff and the bird on the right is a willow warbler:

The yellow stripe above the eye is very similar in both birds and, although you can’t see the legs in the photos, I can tell you that they were pretty much the same colour as well. These are two things that I would have used to identify them in the field, although chiffchaffs do also regularly flick their tails and willow warblers don’t. Looking at these photos, the only difference that I can really see between these two birds is that the willow warblers wings on the right are 1cm longer since they migrate further to southern Africa, whereas the chiffchaff winters around the Mediterranean or in north Africa.

Once he had the birds in the hand, John was able to tell that they were different species by looking at diagnostic differences in the primary flight feathers, but, if you don’t have the luxury of being able to do that, they can sometimes be really difficult to tell apart.

He also caught eight blackcaps. A blackcap he had caught back on 1st July weighed 16.9g and this is typical for that time of year. But the eight birds he caught this week were much heavier, varying between 18.8g to 22.6g, having gorged themselves on berries to prepare for their migration.

In a first for the meadows, a family of pheasants is being raised here this year:

Pheasants are native to Asia but have been introduced to most of Europe as a gamebird. Shockingly, an estimated 31 to 40 million of them are released into the British countryside every year in order to be shot, and unfortunately they then proceed to eat our native wildlife. But there is no shooting in the countryside immediately around the meadows and these pheasants have found somewhere where they can live a peaceful life as a small feral population. They will need to be careful of our foxes though.

A young green woodpecker is making a bid to appear on every single camera in the meadows:

Its beak looks especially long here on the perch because its tongue is slightly poking out:

A few seconds later a young wood pigeon flew across onto this perch and this seemed to make everyone feel very uncomfortable:

A juvenile great-spotted woodpecker was also seen in the meadows this week, which is a most unusual bird for here:

And there have been some nice views of the male kestrel as he comes down to have a bath:

Owls have been appearing on the cameras every night and sometimes there are photos of both species on the same night. I wonder if they ever come across each other and how that works out?

On doing a quick bit of research it seems that tawny owls are larger than barn owls and can also be highly territorial and aggressive. If food is scarce tawnies can apparently attack barn owls over their hunting grounds.

There is a little group of extraordinary-looking feral pigeons visiting the meadows at the moment. I’ve never seen ones quite like these before:

We returned from Cornwall to find the large pear tree in the orchard completely stripped of all its fruit. How I wish I’d remembered to put some trail cameras on it before I left. Back in September 2020 we got these amazing photos of tree-climbing foxes and, every September since then, I’ve been hoping for some more:

But this time I have had to content myself with these four images below, all taken on different days, of a fox making off with pears. It is the same fox on each occasion with a nick out of his right ear, and I wonder if he had to climb the tree to get them?

I think it is so endearing how much foxes love pears, but Dave finds himself slightly aggrieved that, once more, he is not going to get any pear crumble.

I am delighted to see that two of the three badger cubs that were born this year have survived the drought and there are currently six badgers in the meadows:

I am also pleased that a little weasel is once more regularly being seen here on the cameras:

This weasel will be hunting small rodents, using its slender body to follow them into their underground burrows.

I got a most unexpected moth in the trap this week:

The heath rustic is a moth of acid heaths and moorlands where heather grows, and it is a very strange sight indeed for calcareous grassland. Below is a map from the Kentmoths.org website showing the previous all-time Kent records for heath rustic:

This week I also ran the moth trap in our daughter Sally’s garden in Wye in the North Kent Downs. Our grandson is nearly four now and it was high time that he gets used to the feel of a large yellow underwing crawling on his hand:

At the end of a long, hot summer, there are lots of autumn jobs that we now need to getting on with. The meadows need to be cut for starters but also the two big ponds have had a terrible time in this dry summer and need some TLC. We have pulled out all the bulrushes that were taking over in the hide pond and its good to see some open water again:

Across in the wood, the summer drought has also taken its toll on the newish pond in the marjoram clearing. Up until this year we had been very careful to ensure that only rain water went into it, but we ran out of rainwater stores this summer and had to top it up with tap water to ensure that it didn’t totally dry out. Tap water will have picked up nutrients from its contact with the ground and, as a result, the pond has now grown duck weed:

This doesn’t seem to worry the jays who are always frequent and enthusiastic bathers:

But perhaps this tawny bowl is a bit concerned?

When I next collected the camera cards in, though, I saw that it had managed to overcome its initial hesitation:

My final photo for today is of our son Jonny who was recently in the Atacama Desert which stretches for a thousand miles between the Andes and the Chilean coast. We might have had a very dry summer here in the UK but the average annual rainfall in the Atacama is just 15mm, although some of the weather stations in the desert have never recorded rain. Because of its high altitude, nonexistent cloud cover and freedom from light pollution, it is one of the best places in the world to observe the night skies:

Twelve months ago our daughter Sarah and her family returned to live in Perranporth in the west of Cornwall, somewhere they had lived and fallen in love with several years before.

Tame rock pipits were pecking around the café tables to pick up any crumbs:

They can now walk down to Perranporth’s absolutely beautiful sandy beach, which has the added attraction of many interesting rock pools at low tide:

I had brought my battery-powered moth trap with me and ran it in their garden one night to kick off their moth list. There do seem to be an awful lot of large yellow underwings around this year and this is good news for the many bat species who are major predators of them:

One of the ways to get to their house involves driving over a low bridge across a stream that flows down their valley to the beach and thence out to sea:

A European eel, Anguilla anguilla, has its lair there, hidden amongst some rocks and weed in the stream by the bridge:

In the last 25 years this species has experienced a catastrophic collapse, with a 95% reduction in its population across Britain. This is probably due to a depressing combination of factors such as overfishing, barriers on their migratory routes, habitat loss and degradation, changes in Atlantic currents as well as pollution in our waters. These animals are now critically endangered in Britain and in many other parts of Europe.

This severe decline in Britain has had significant implications, since they once comprised over 50% of fish biomass in some European freshwater habitats and were a vital part of the food web.

These eels breed in the Sargasso Sea near Bermuda and the young eel larvae cross the Atlantic and enter freshwater as they swim up our rivers and streams. They then stay there, living in these rivers and streams as well as lakes and ditches, for many years as they mature. Once they are ready to reproduce, they swim back across the Atlantic to return to the Sargasso Sea to lay their eggs and die.

It is estimated that each eel will spend ten to twenty years in our freshwater before returning back across the ocean, although this can apparently be as long as fifty years.

They are generally nocturnal but we put some oily tinned sardines into the stream to tempt the eel briefly out into the open so that we could get a proper look at it:

Excitingly, as the smell of the sardines worked its way downstream, another eel swam upriver to join the one that lives by the bridge:

I had never seen a European eel before but now I find myself a bit obsessed.

Perranporth is indeed a very lovely place to live but is also a long way from us in East Kent and we are experimenting with ways to meet up with them that works best for us all. One option is to turn our stay with them in Cornwall into a fuller holiday and we did that this time. After a few days in Perranporth, we joined a Naturetrek tour called ‘Cornwall – Beavers, Choughs and Cetaceans’.

On the first day of the Naturetrek holiday we walked along the coast from Lizard Point to Kynance Cove and then back across the headland.

A National Trust volunteer we met told us that 140 red-billed chough chicks are thought to have fledged in Cornwall this summer, which is wonderful news indeed. Our group did see around seventeen chough on this walk although I failed to get a photo. A DNA analysis of some of the birds in the Lizard area suggests that the chough have arrived naturally across from Ireland.

There is a lot of the beautiful, but aggressively invasive, hotentot fig growing around Lizard Point. This succulent is a native of South Africa and completely outcompetes rare native plants:

Kynance Cove is very picturesque but was quite busy with other humans, even on a Tuesday after the schools had gone back:

As we walked back over the headland, we found a group of around eighteen wheatear waiting for the right conditions to head south across the Channel:

And we saw a migrating whinchat:

But my highlight of the day was the sighting of a grayling butterfly – a first for me.

Our Naturetrek guide, Oliver, ran his moth trap in the hotel grounds overnight and we enjoyed going through the moths the next morning. A lot of large yellow underwings turned up again:

This female four-spotted footman is a lovely moth. At home in Kent, this would be a migrant moth but I learned that they do now breed in Cornwall and this female could well be resident:

A firecrest with its crest raised in the hotel grounds:

On the second day we went on a seven-hour pelagic wildlife boat trip out of Falmouth harbour. As we waited to be let onboard, we enjoyed watching the thicklip grey mullet, Chelon labrosus, swimming in the shallow waters of the marina:

Skipper Jake took us out to sea on the Spirit of Our Seas:

There is a lot of reflection on this screen below, but it is a sonar image of all the fish that were passing under the boat at the entrance of the river:

For a lot of the boat trip we saw very little wildlife which was unlucky. However, things improved markedly as we started to make our way back to Falmouth. A great mass of seabirds was an indication that there was a bait ball of fish close to the surface of the water:

There were also rafts of manx shearwater sitting on the surface:

It was about then that some common dolphins started bow-riding the boat. For a while there were just three of them but numbers gradually increased to eleven as others arrived to join in the fun.

I could have watched them for hours.

On the third day we visited Woodland Valley Farm near Truro and spent the day with the very inspirational farmer, Chris Jones.

In the morning Chris took us around his farm where his cattle are pasture fed and stay out on the land all year round.

He has planted trees in strips in several of his fields to produce a form of wood pasture:

His fifty head of cattle are then ‘mob-grazed’ along the strips. They are concentrated onto a quarter of an acre in the morning and then moved onto the next quarter of an acre in the afternoon. In this way they gradually work their way along all of the strips in a field and then move onto the next field where they do the same thing.

The benefits of this approach are very convincing. Each grazed area is then left untouched for months, allowing plants to regrow, form deep roots, and flower. No artificial fertilisers are needed and there are no winter housing costs for the cattle. Parasite lifecycles are broken and wormers are often no longer necessary, allowing dung beetles to flourish along with everything else that loves to eat them. As well as that, there is better soil health, drought resilience and much increased invertebrate diversity. Skylarks and meadow pipits hold a special place in Chris’ heart and they do very well indeed with this approach to grazing his land.

For our visit, his cattle were grazing on a quarter of an acre of a sixteen acre field that has not yet had rows of trees planted:

After lunch Chris took us down to the Nankilly Water stream that runs in a valley through his farm and where beavers were reintroduced into a fenced, five acre enclosure in June 2017. They had two kits in 2018 and these were the first beavers to be born in Cornwall in four hundred years.

Before the beavers arrived, it took water ten minutes to pass along Chris’ stretch of the valley. It now takes an hour and a half as it trickles into various pools and seeps out through leaky dams. The information board below has other positive changes that have happened as a result of the reintroduction of the beavers:

Another pleasing view across the beaver-created landscape:

Some trees had been felled:

And here is Chris demonstrating what you need to do if you don’t want the beavers to touch a particular tree:

After seeing around the beaver area, we went off to have some dinner in a local pub. We returned as it got dark to wait for the beavers to emerge:

A mother and one of this year’s kits did come out once it got properly dark and we got good views of them through binoculars. They didn’t seem to mind a strong beam of torch light shining on them.

We got back to the hotel at about 11pm after a long but extremely interesting day in the company of a remarkable farmer who is passionate about all nature, but especially beavers.

On the final day we visited the Cornwall Wildlife Trust Windmill Farm nature reserve, an 85 hectare reserve on the Lizard Penninsula. Since taking over this former dairy farm in 2001, the Wildlife Trust has created more than thirty pools and scrapes and seventeen species of dragonflies and damselflies are regularly seen there. This includes the lesser emperor, which we saw but which I didn’t manage to photograph, and this was a new species of dragonfly for me.

We also spotted this daffodil-yellow female red-veined darter which now breeds on the reserve:

There is a lovely area of heathland on the reserve as well, which was really good for spiders and the caterpillars of heathland moths:

We did find some great spiders. Clockwise from left: the four-spotted orbweb spider, Araneus quadratus, is Britain’s heaviest spider, the gorse orbweb spider, Agalenatea redii, and the wasp spider, Argiope bruennichi

And we found several wasp spider egg sacs:

The spectacular caterpillars we found were, clockwise from top left: The broom moth caterpillar, the drinker moth caterpillar and the fox moth caterpillar

I have lost count of how many Naturetrek trips we have done now, but we have really enjoyed every single one.

There are only around sixty British species of butterfly. After seeing the grayling for the first time this week, I wondered how many of these sixty I have seen and what it would take to see them all? It would be a wonderful project to try to tick the rest of them off over the next few years. I need to properly research this but it would probably mean a trip to Scotland or the Lake District for mountain ringlet and Ireland for cryptic wood white, and there are definitely several fritillaries that I am yet to see too. An enjoyable challenge to look forward to over the next few years!

With August now drawing to a close and schools soon going back, there is a feeling that we are inexorably sliding into autumn.

The two swift chicks that were being raised in a nest box attached to the house have now fledged, and the family should already be well on its way across Europe:

The front lawn has once more been declared out of bounds as delicate autumn lady’s-tresses push their heads up above the soil:

And the ivy bee is the final solitary bee to emerge, timed to coincide with the ivy coming into flower at this time of year:

Wasp spiders are now out in force amongst the meadow grasses, hoping for grasshoppers and crickets to make that fatal error of judgement and end up in their webs:

Badgers have started dragging dry grasses down underground to prepare their living quarters for the coming winter:

There have been some major excavations around the sett as renovations are carried out underground:

The autumn bird migration is now well underway. The cuckoos and swifts have already gone and many more species are starting to follow them. This wheatear below is a new species for the meadows – number 104 – but it’s a shame that the trail camera didn’t get it properly into focus:

John, the bird ringer, has had his nets up in the meadows twice recently and caught some of these migrants as they make their way south. This whitethroat was born this year:.

He also caught some birds that will probably be staying around here this winter. This was one of four young wrens that he has ringed this week:

And this great tit also hatched this year:

It is a very sad fact that this greenfinch below, caught on a trail camera this week, is the first greenfinch that I have seen in either the meadows or the wood for a very long time:

Very soon now the annual cut of the meadows will be getting underway and Dave will be hoping to get the job done before the autumn storms set in. This will inevitably expose small mammals that have, up until now, been safely hidden amongst the long grasses, and usually means that some exciting birds of prey will turn up. The kestrels, though, have been hunting here even before Dave gets going on the tractor:

And the barn owl has been patrolling at night, although this is the best photo I have of it this time:

This week I went along to a family mothing event at Led by the Wild, a not-for-profit community interest company situated halfway between Ashford and Hythe, which manages its thirty acres of land for wildlife, as well as holding events and nature projects. I have to say that I found it all terribly inspirational.

I was with our daughter Sally and her family, and we will now be keeping an eye out for future events being held.

There have been a lot of hummingbird hawk-moths around Kent this summer. They are still mainly migrants to this country, arriving here from southern Europe and northern Africa. They do then breed here over the summer, laying their eggs on plants of the bedstraw family, and these UK-born moths boost numbers towards the end of the summer. There is evidence that they are also occasionally able to survive our winters, although this appears to be the exception rather than the rule:

There aren’t any horse chestnut trees in the meadows and only a couple of them in the wood. These days horse chestnuts look like they are dying back for autumn way ahead of time because of heavy infestations of the horse chestnut leaf miner moth, Cameraria ohridella

This moth was first recorded in Wimbledon in 2002 and has rapidly spread across England and Wales and continues to reach further west and north every year

Several of the adult moths were to be seen resting under the leaves:

It is a small moth whose larvae live in mines within the horse chestnut leaves and, in hot summers such as this one, there can be as many as five generations of the moth a year. They do not kill the tree, but they surely reduce its vigour as, year after year, the leaves will not be producing as much food for the tree as they would otherwise be doing. Much work has been going on in the background to try to find a good way to control these moths and a number of natural predators have been observed. Blue tits, great tits and marsh tits do feed on the larvae within the leaf but, between them, they apparently only take 2-4% of the moth larvae and another solution is still needed.

Elsewhere in the wood, some of the lime trees have nail galls on their leaves:

They are caused by the gall mite Eriophyes tiliae. Each gall is around a centimetre long and is full of tiny pale hairs among which the mites feed. A hole on the underside of the leaf allows the mites to escape in the autumn before the leaf falls. They move to crevices in the bark, especially around the bases of the buds, where they overwinter before making their way to the young leaves in the spring.

I ran the moth trap in the wood for the first time since April. However, I once more had the problem that I have had before in the wood – the moths were too warm and active and immediately flew away as I opened the trap. When I run the trap in the meadows, I have some really cool, deep shade that I can put the trap into for a while before opening it, meaning that the moths then largely stay put. I suppose that one solution would be to return to the wood very early the next morning before the day warms up, and perhaps I will try that next time.

Although most of the moths flew away before I could look at them, I did find several of these fork-palped harvestmen, Dicranopalpus ramosus, in the trap:

Adults can be found in the late summer and they have really long legs – the second pair can each be as much as 5cm in length:

They are omnivorous scavengers, eating a varied diet of small insects, dead organic matter and fungi and algae. Unlike spiders, they do not have venom or silk glands but instead use those forked pedipalps and leg hooks to catch food and tear it into chunks. The species originated in Morocco but has been spreading out from there for some time. It reached the UK in Bournemouth in 1957 and reached Scotland in 2000.

The Walmer Castle wildlife team had a day out to the wood to accompany Dave and me on our August tour around the dormouse boxes. It seems that the number of dormice being found in nest boxes across Kent has been down in the heat of the summer, so I was pleased that we did find three dormice this time to show the team:

We might be slowly stepping into autumn here in the UK, but at the very tip of South America, Argentina is just beginning to anticipate the coming of spring. Our son Jonny and his wife are holidaying there and sent us this photo of a Chimango caracara sitting on the fence with a very daunting backdrop indeed:

We have been reading that the high temperatures around Europe this summer have led to many people choosing to ‘coolcation’ in more northerly climes. But this is taking coolcationing to the extreme and we are looking forward to hearing how they got on.

The notorious Goodwin Sands lie about six miles off the coast of Deal. Historically nicknamed ‘the great ship swallower’, it is a dangerous ten-mile long sandbank where around 2,000 ships have been wrecked over the centuries.

Due to the dangers, the area was guarded by five lightships in the 19th century. Of these, the South Goodwin Lightvessel had a particularly turbulent history. It was bombed and sunk by the Germans in the Second World War and then, in 1954, its replacement suffered a terrible tragedy. On the night of 26th November, the cables to her two anchors broke in a hurricane-force storm and she was wrecked, killing seven of the eight people on board. The one survivor, who was rescued the next morning having clung to the rigging in raging seas for nine hours, had only been visiting the vessel to record bird migration.

The South Goodwin Lightship has now been replaced by a light buoy. In fact, until this week, the East Goodwin Lightship was the only remaining lightship of the five that once guarded the sands, all the others having been changed to light buoys over the years. She was such an iconic sight, and one that was easily visible from the meadows through binoculars. We got a closer look at her when we took a boat trip out to the Goodwins to have a walk on the sands back in 2024:

Below is a better photo of her, taken in Harwich in 2004, presumably when she was on her way out to the sands to replace an earlier model:

The safety of shipping and the well-being of seafarers have been the primary concerns of Trinity House since being incorporated by Royal Charter in 1514. Their two ships, the Patricia and the Galatea, are responsible for maintaining the navigational aids around the entire coastlines of England and Wales and the Channel Islands.

Because of the number of these navigational aids around the Goodwin Sands, one or other of these ships is often anchored overnight alongside the meadows. But it was completely unprecedented that both of them were here, as they were one night this week:

Later on that morning, we saw them working together further out to sea:

It was a couple of days after this that Dave was sitting at the top of the meadows with his birding scope, hoping to point the East Goodwin Lightship out to some visitors. He was very confused indeed when it seemed to have completely disappeared.

He researched this on returning inside and discovered that the East Goodwin Lightship had just been retired and towed back to Harwich by the Patricia. She has now been replaced by a light buoy which will be much easier to maintain. We presume that this happened on the day that both ships were working here together.

If there are any plans for what is now to happen to the East Goodwin Lightship, we cannot find any reference to them. A list of British Lightvessels on Wikipedia shows that some have become photographic studios, social spaces for yacht clubs, and floating art galleries and museums after they retired. Back in 2023 we stayed at Tollesbury in Essex where LV15 rests her old bones. She retired in the late 80s and was bought by the Fellowship Afloat Charitable Trust who provide outdoor activities for kids who sleep onboard the lightvessel, which must be very memorable for them.

Things change and technology marches on, but we will certainly miss that big, red lightship that was always there on duty out to sea.

This week the full-scale replica of the Nao Victoria sailed into Dover and we went to take a look at her. The Nao Victoria was the first ship to circumnavigate the globe. It was one of five ships that left Seville in 1519 to try to find a good route to the spice islands, an archipelago in eastern Indonesia. But after three years at sea, four of the ships had been lost and it was only the Nao Victoria that returned to Spain, having successfully sailed around the entire world.

A full scale replica of the ship was built in 1991 and, between 2004 and 2006, she repeated the journey of the original ship.

This summer she is visiting Dover for ten days and I have to say that she looked really small and such an odd sight moored up at the modern docks:

Whilst we were in Dover to see the Nao Victoria, we also went for a drink in one of Dover’s oldest pubs, The White Horse Inn, in a building which dates back to 1365:

But it wasn’t its great age that brought us there because it is famous for being the Channel swimmers’ pub. For decades, successful Channel swimmers have come to the pub after their swim to sign the walls and ceilings with their name and the date and timing of their swim.

You have to be in awe of Nora of Mexico who seems to have swum the Channel nine times, including a solo swim in 1994 when she swam from England to France and then back to England again in 23 hours 38 minutes:

I have driven past this pub so many times and now at last we have gone in.

The big news in the meadows is that we have finally had some rain! The drought eventually broke a week ago with some overnight rain and, in the refreshing cool of the next morning, I took this shocking photo from my bedroom window as a record of how dry the summer of 2026 has been:

Hopefully we will now start to see some green returning to this view.

With the breeding season over, John, the bird ringer, can once more play bird calls at his nets. The warblers are already on the move and he caught this young reed warbler in the meadows this week:

And he was cross not to have had his nets up when this pied flycatcher called in for a drink this week en route for Africa:

The blackbirds have started on the sloes:

And this is a rather spectacular photo of a magpie:

I am pleased that a barn owl has been hunting in the meadows most nights recently:

And the trail camera took this photo just at the moment that a stock dove lost a feather:

The two young swifts in the nest box attached to the house are continuing to grow well and spend a lot of their day peering out of the box to await the return of their parents:

It is funny to see the little family at night when the four of them attempt to cram themselves into the small feather nest:

It won’t be long now until they are gone.

My last photo for today is of a curious young fox who peered down at our daughter Lizzie and her partner through their kitchen roof-light in Walthamstow one morning:

I think it gave them quite a shock.

I would like to finish by dedicating this post to my aunt Rhona, whose funeral we went to this week in Cardiff. She was a wonderful lady who very much liked to travel the seas herself. She had a long and happy life and was a big supporter of this blog.

This week we returned for a few days to Curry Farm, a 65 acre private nature reserve near Bradwell-on-Sea on the Blackwater estuary in Essex:

Stephen Dewick and his wife Jean live at Curry farm today but it was Stephen’s late father who bought the farm back in 1932 and apples and then cereals were grown there until the early 1990s. Now, however, the land is totally given over to wildlife conservation. Stephen, like his father before him, has been extremely interested in macro moths his entire life and, incredibly, a moth trap has been run at Curry Farm on an almost nightly basis since 1946

But it is a moth trap like no other that I have seen before. It is apparently the largest moth trap in the country – a walk-in building with soil banked up around it to keep it cool and a 400 watt metal halide bulb shining on its roof to bring the moths in.

There is a funnel below the bulb into which the moths tumble, eventually ending up in the room below:

As it gets dark the next evening, the moths are allowed to escape for a couple of hours before the door is once more shut and the light on the roof goes back on as the next night’s mothing commences.

Stephen’s father, Bob Dewick, is famous in mothing circles because, in 1951, he discovered a species at Curry Farm that was new to Britain. The moth was given the common name Dewick’s plusia in his honour. After its discovery, the moth remained a very rare immigrant for many years, but has now started breeding in this country and numbers have increased significantly.

I had never seen a Dewick’s plusia before, but this week | saw four of them in the walk-in trap one morning. How very fitting to have seen my first Dewick’s plusia whilst standing next to a Dewick.

All the photos taken in the moth trap come out very orange because of the light in there, but here are two of the Dewick’s plusia moths that I saw this week:

Stephen catches far too many moths every day to count and report them all, so he only records rarities, interesting aberrations, first-sighting-of-the-years and migrant moths.

In this hot weather, he has already been getting lots of migrants. This is a bordered straw which doesn’t breed in this country:

And nor does the Vestal:

The eyed hawk-moth is not a migrant but I include it below because of the face, with eyes and long nose, that it flashes when threatened by a potential predator. This face been proven to deter insectivorous birds:

But, for me, the most astounding thing I saw in the trap was not a moth at all. The great silver water beetle, Hydrophilus piceus, is very large indeed, reaching a length of around 5cm. It is rare in the UK, only being found in a few places such as East Anglia and the Somerset levels. It lives in ponds and ditches but can fly to disperse and is attracted to light so does occasionally turn up in the Curry Farm moth trap:

We also saw lesser stag beetles out on the reserve, which was a new species for me as well:

On the underside of the stag beetle were some hitch-hiking mites which are harmless to the beetle and are simply clinging on so that they can be transported to new food sources:

The 65 acre reserve was looking as parched as our meadows are back home. Dave nearly trod on a large grass snake that was basking on one of the paths and apparently there are adders on the reserve as well:

We noticed quite a few wild plum trees that were dripping with ripe fruit at this time of year:

There was plenty of evidence that these plums were being eaten by the foxes:

Badgers will also be eating these plums as they drop to the ground, and we realised that this fruit must be a valuable food source for them in high summer when the ground is hard and worms are unavailable. On returning home I have immediately ordered three container-grown cherry plum trees to plant out in the meadows this coming autumn. Not only will the cherry plum be the first tree to flower each spring, providing energy-rich nectar for early bees and butterflies, they will also help to feed the badgers in late summer as they await the autumn rains.

We had a gentle few days in Essex in the high temperatures and with our elderly dog in tow, but we really enjoyed it and are planning on returning for a third visit next year.

Back in the meadows, winged ants have been taking to the air to disperse from the hundreds, if not thousands, of ant nests here. Large numbers of black-headed gulls arrive seemingly from nowhere and fly round and round trying to catch them. It is an annual spectacle that we look forward to:

The two swift chicks in the nest box attached to the side of the house are growing fast and I’m delighted to report that both parents are still in attendance:

The ringed kestrel has been a regular visitor to the meadows since 2019. Bringing up three chicks this year has taken its toll and she is definitely looking a bit ropey at the moment. But she has also now embarked on her annual moult, which will progress slowly so that she is still able to effectively hunt throughout. Before too long she should look smart once more:

She has her back to us here as she takes a cooling bath with the male:

And here is one of their young:

Many birds are now moulting following the hard work of the breeding season:

I’m pleased to see both badger cubs still going strong and are out with their mother here:

This week a badger dug a small latrine near the garden and very accurately deposited some dung in it:

They excavated a wasp nest one night to get at the combs full of protein-rich larvae. This is the best photo I got the next morning because there were still lots of very angry wasps buzzing around it and I decided not to get too close:

Over in the wood, another animal that likes to eat wasp larvae has returned to the same shallow pool:

Elsewhere in the wood a common buzzard arrives for a drink:

And I love this photo below of water cascading down from its beak:

Dave recently took this photo of two stock dove chicks that were being raised in the tawny owl nest box:

Five days later we met John, the bird ringer, at the wood so that he could ring them. It hadn’t been very long at all but they had developed so much:

The eclipse on Wednesday evening brought Dave and I out into the meadows wearing our wacky cardboard eclipse glasses:

I have now seen some fantastic images that some people managed to capture of the eclipse, and my best effort below definitely isn’t one of these. However, it is a record shot of a very memorable event

But there was a second significant event in the meadows this week when the partner of our youngest child, Lizzie, told us he wanted to have a picnic in the meadows at which he planned to propose to her. Dave and I did what we could to prepare a magical space for them, setting up the picnic at the top of the meadows with views over the Channel and across to the white cliffs of France:

There was a slight hiccup when he got down on one knee and presented her with a small box that unexpectedly turned out to be completely empty of a ring, and for this he will forever be teased. However, she said yes regardless.

We are now looking forward to a family wedding in 2027.

There was a very interesting visitor to the wood this week:

This is a male honey buzzard, birds with a specialist diet that mainly eat the protein-rich larvae of wasps, bees and hornets. They sit quietly and watch the flight patterns of the insects in order to locate their nests. Once found, they then tear the nest open with their powerful claws to access the combs of larvae. They have several evolutionary adaptations to help them cope with being stung, such as the feathers on their heads which are short and stiff and arranged like fish scales.

It is thought that there are only 130 to 150 pairs of these birds nesting in Britain and this is a shame because they are the only natural predator we have for the invasive Asian hornets that have recently arrived in this country.

As a rare breeding bird in the UK, the location of honey buzzard nests are usually swathed in great secrecy for the birds’ protection. However there was a honey buzzard nest in the Ashdown Forest, Sussex, featured on this year’s Springwatch television programme back in May. As of 3rd August, the live footage of this nest with two chicks is still being broadcast and can be viewed at ashdownforest.org/honey-buzzard-livecam/ although the chicks do now look close to fledging and will surely soon be gone. It is the first ever live streaming of a honey buzzard nest in the UK and I hope that it is being watched closely by experts and that much is being learned.

This week I have been regularly checking in wth the nest to see what is going on. Below the two chicks have just been given a large piece of honeycomb by their mother, out of which they were extracting the wasp larvae:

It is mostly honeycomb that is coming in to the nest, but in this next photo the adult male on the right has delivered a bird chick that he delicately pulled small bits off to feed to his chicks:

Blean Woods is a large area of remote woodland around Canterbury and I am now speculating that perhaps the honey buzzard seen in our wood this week has a nest somewhere there.

But the honey buzzard was not the only new species spotted in the wood. Two botanical experts were doing a survey there recently and found a broad-leaved helleborine in a clearing:

We went to where the botanists had spotted the plant and managed to find six more as well. Most of them were now bearing seed pods, indicating that they have already flowered and that those flowers were pollinated. There has been research to suggest that the flowers of this helleborine mimic the smell of green leaves that are being attacked by caterpillars. The common wasp and the German wasp are drawn to the plant, hoping to predate the non-existent caterpillars, and end up pollinating its flowers whilst they are there.

Although the flowers are greenish and somewhat inconspicuous, we are sorry to have missed them and hope that these plants will return next year.

The third and final new species to be spotted in the wood this week was crawling around on a woodpile:

This very large caterpillar grows up to 6.5cm. I put my hand in front of the caterpillar so that it crawled over it, which gives it some perspective:

This caterpillar will pupate in loose soil or leaf litter underneath the lime tree and this is how it will spend the winter. In the spring it will emerge as an adult, which also looks pretty wonderful:

This spring four tawny owl chicks were raised in a tawny owl nest box attached to a large beech tree at the edge of a clearing. John, the bird ringer, ringed them on 6th May and they all fledged a week later:

The owls had previously nested in the box in 2022 and fledged two young. But where were they nesting in the intervening years? Tawnies are generally faithful to a nest site, but perhaps ours are having to rotate between several sites within their territory because of competition with squirrels? Once a tawny owl has selected a nest site, they are able to defend it but, if the squirrels get to the box first and fill it with twigs and leaves, the box becomes unusable by the owls. Squirrels certainly did nest in the box in 2023, 2024 and 2025.

Dave has decided to make a new tawny owl box along the lines of this successful one, and place it at the edge of a newly-created clearing elsewhere in the wood. We hope that this will increase the options for the owls.

While he was up at the box, he had a quick look in and found two stock dove chicks:

We have arranged to meet John at the wood in a few days for him to ring these chicks.

In this continued hot and dry weather the owls have been coming to the ponds every day and it’s so lovely to see them:

Over in the meadows, I was pleased to see this photo of both badger cubs together because I was worrying about how they were getting on in this drought:

And it’s always interesting to get an insight into what the foxes are eating. This is some kind of largish bird:

Whilst this is a rabbit:

This perch alongside the hedgerow is the only one that I ever see sparrowhawks using. They don’t like perching out in the open:

All continues well in the swift box attached to the side of the house. There are still two adults in attendance and the chicks are growing fast:

Last year we found 149 wasp spiders out in the meadows. So far this year we have only found one:

While I was out looking for wasp spiders, I did find this different species which was less than half the size but did also have a lot of yellow on her.

The clouded yellow butterfly is an immigrant to the UK and many more arrive some years than others. We hadn’t seen one at all in the meadows since 2023 but have been happy to see several here this year:

Our son Jonny and his wife are still in Madagascar and continue to send us photos of the sometimes wacky wildlife that they are seeing. This nymph of the flatid leaf bug, Phromnia rosea, is endemic to the tropical dry forests of Madagascar and looks really quite extraordinary:

The adult bugs have wide pink wings which they hold in a tent like fashion, concealing the body. Thus, when they group together, they could well be mistaken for a flower spike:

What a fantastic wildlife experience they are having out there. Look closely, though, and British wildlife can be pretty amazing too.

It has been tremendously dry this summer and most things here have turned yellow. The Agapanthus, sitting at the threshold between the garden and the meadows, is a notable exception. A native of South Africa, it takes this sort of thing in its stride:

The wild pond totally dried up whilst we were on holiday and we weren’t here to take the extreme decision to top it up with tap water. This pond was dug in 2016 and had not dried out completely before:

The hard, dry ground makes life terribly difficult for badgers, for whom worms would ordinarily be 70% of their diet. This photo was taken just as we were leaving for the Outer Hebrides when the grass was still green, but I’m pleased to report that these four adult badgers and at least one of the cubs are still alive:

It was very busy along Walmer seafront last week as the Downs Sailing Club hosted the National Schools Sailing Regatta for the first time in twelve years. How lovely to see the waters in front of the meadows so alive with young people enjoying this wholesome activity:

As we were admiring all the dinghies one morning, ten small planes flew over our heads in formation. It was the Swiss Airforce aerial display team flying their Pilatus PC-7 aircraft up to an airshow at RAF Leeming in North Yorkshire:

I am pleased to see that, even in this prolonged dry weather when worms and other soil-dwelling invertebrates must be so hard to come by, blackbird chicks are still successfully fledging:

Song thrushes have learned to switch to snails when worms are not available:

Just below the gate is a snail graveyard with hundreds of shells:

A wren has taken to spreading all its feathers out and sunbathing on this perch:

And a great spotted woodpecker is an unusual sight here in the meadows:

We are no longer seeing the complete kestrel family that had previously been hanging out on our roof, although one or two of them are still calling by:

The ringed female is looking a bit tatty after all the hard work of bringing up her family:

It’s always exciting to see owls in the meadows:

This year two pairs of swifts nested in the swift boxes attached to the side of the house. One of these pairs built a nest but then didn’t lay any eggs, and they have now already left on their migration back to Africa. Hopefully they will return next year to breed.

For a long time it looked like the other pair were also not going to lay any eggs but they finally did, a month later than in the previous two years. There are now two feathered chicks in the box doing well:

The many great green bush-crickets that live amongst the meadow grasses are a tasty snack for the birds:

When I run the moth trap, I try to get to it the next morning whilst it is still dark and before the birds get up. Any moths that haven’t quite made it into the shelter of the trap are vulnerable to being picked off by magpies once it gets light and I feel responsible for their safety. This week I got up at 3am and went out to the trap to turn off the light and pot up any exposed moths.

I was shocked to see a forlorn collection of wings already scattered around in the base of the trap and a great green bush-cricket sitting at the entrance, grabbing moths as they arrived. I managed to catch her and get her into a large jar:

Later the same morning I released her back into the meadows and took a better photo before she jumped away:

The hummingbird hawk-moth is mainly an immigrant to this country from southern Europe and north Africa, although for several years now some have also been surviving our winters and breeding in southern England:

On the other hand, it is far from normal to see clearwing moths. Even though there are probably quite a lot of them around, they manage to keep themselves well under the human radar. This week I put pheromone lures out and caught two additional clearwing moth species. The six-belted clearwing was caught in the meadows amongst birds-foot trefoil, one of its larval foodplants:

And two red-belted clearwing were caught close to a hawthorn tree in the wood:

I have now seen six of the fourteen clearwing species resident in the British Isles. The others that I have spotted, clockwise from top left, are the orange-tailed clearwing, currant clearwing, red-tipped clearwing and the fiery clearwing:

What wonderful things they are.

I feel that hoverflies are generally underappreciated and ill-understood by many people, myself included. As well as the adults being excellent pollinators, the larvae of around 40% of British species are gardeners’ friends, being important predators of aphids.

There has been recent evidence that hoverflies are in steep decline across Great Britain and, given their significance in the ecosystem, I find it amazing that the larvae of only about two thirds of UK hoverfly species have even been described, let alone their lifecycle properly understood.

There are around 280 species of hoverfly in the UK. The larvae of about 20% of these are aquatic or semi-aquatic, living in shallow water, mud or tree rot holes. Another 40% are predatory, eating aphids and other small terrestrial invertebrates. The final 40% of hoverfly larvae live in decaying wood, plant roots, dung or within wasp, bee or ant nests. It feels important to fully get to grips with these lifecycles in order to know how best to conserve them.

I have been admiring two different species of hoverfly this week. This first one is a bit of a corker:

More is known about life cycle of this second hoverfly. It is the great pied hoverfly, Volucella pellucens, which always reminds me of Humpty Dumpty. The adult female lays her eggs in social wasp nests and the hoverfly larvae then live off the detritus at the bottom of the nest.

What is not fully comprehended, though, is how the female hoverfly can successfully sneak undetected into the well-guarded wasp nest.

Over in the wood, the large marjoram clearing has come into glorious flower:

The blossoming marjoram is heaving with invertebrates including many species of butterfly. The silver-washed fritillary is the most magnificent of them all and photos really don’t do them justice. We saw several of these this week:

June’s tour around the dormouse boxes ended up not happening because the only day that we could do was one of the amber heat warning days which would have been madness. So this week we set off on the July tour, with the boxes not having been opened for two months. We had Lottie and Gemma with us, both of whom hope to get their dormouse disturbance licences soon, but need some more experience handling dormice first.

Unfortunately, although we had found eleven dormice on May’s tour, this time we only found three. We speculated that it has been too hot in the boxes and the dormice are making wild nests in more airy places.

The lid of box 29 was firmly stuck down and Dave ended up having to lever it off with a knife. We were all surprised with what we found in there:

My notes from the May tour told me that angry buzzing had been coming from this box and we had wisely decided not to open it. That must have been a tree bumblebee nest because now in the box in July is the nest of the wax moth, Aphomia sociella, whose caterpillars consume the wax, pollen and bee larvae of tree bumblebees. All very interesting.

Other photos from the wood this week:

I finish today with some wildlife sightings from our children. Jonty found a leafcutter bee struggling with an enormous piece of leaf in his greenhouse in Maidenhead. The bee will be using the leaf to make a series of chambers within a tunnel. As she completes each leaf-lined chamber she will stock it with a pile of pollen and lay an egg on it. The resulting larva will live off the pollen that its mother provided for it.

Our other son Jonny and his wife Hayley have been in Madagascar this week and have been sending us photos of many different lemur species and all sorts of other bizarre but wonderful things. This comet moth, Argema mittrei, is gigantic and is endemic to the Madagascan rainforests. The males have a wingspan of 20cm making it one of the largest moths in the World. Here is one clinging to its pupal cocoon:

But the photo below is the most extraordinary of them all to my mind:

It appears to just be a photo of some branches, yet lying along the length of the central branch is a leaf gecko, its head pointing downwards, and with its tail towards the top of the photo. Apparently their nature guide spotted this animal from about five metres away. How amazing is that!